to shift its manner, as if on your first pass it was putting on airs.

Now it slouches a bit, spits in the dirt, adjusts its crotch. The streets are muddier, the wet earth a suspicious shade and smell sucking at each step you take. The buildings are more worn, windows busted, peeling paint, split shingles fallen from roofs, it’s all so much scummier than just minutes ago.

An odd detail in the landscape gives you pause. In a shadow of yellowish muck beside a saloon (its doors shut, a cracked window filled inwardly with what looks like waxpaper, a sole white sheet affixed to the exterior: For Selling)—here, in the shadow of the off-leaning saloon’s awning rests, at your feet, in shadow, in rackish mud, a small dead bird. One gentle wing gathered over its slain form, slain eyes, like a child tucked to sleep after the long commotion of day.

You look up at the crack in the saloon window. Down again at the bird. Is something to be understood in this. A constellation between two dismal stars: a lesson, of sorts: as in, a death describes a life: a circle describes an arc: a shadow, a light. Or better: a word describes a mind, a mind existence, existence meaning. And meaning means what, what follows, an author of creation, of this barren place?

All this time of your mental backtracking, the streets all about you have emptied, drained of their recent life. As if you’ve stumbled onto a forgotten movie set. You extend your toe toward the bird and as your muddy boot makes contact you can’t help but flinch—perhaps it is only sleeping and will start suddenly with the fury of life.

Its body yields to the pressure, doesn’t move so much as cave.

The death of small things is always depressing. As much for the loss, here/gone, as for the nothing you can do about it. You resume walking, a bit morose now, and suddenly it’s as if the world wants to cheer you up, as if a magician’s wand has passed over the town: the streets resume their existence, shoppers mingling on the boardwalk, horsemen in the thoroughfare, peddlers selling wares and sausages and oysters plucked fresh from the sea. You move through it all, remembering what brought you here: worry for the girl caught with the two grim men. The bird lingers in your mind. The mud slows your pace. You recall once in childhood being chided for dragging your feet, scuffling your soles on your first ever day of school. After years happily sheltered inside, who wouldn’t be resistant? Who would actually want to leave the warm bosom of home for strange buildings filled with stranger strangers?

Those were the days, you recall, succumbing to memory, of the comet in the sky.

The comet of your youth. At night it was something else to look at, a smeared glowing blur across the sky, a firefly crushed by a child’s thumb, a bird struck by a too-hard pain of glass. There was such delight in watching it, as in anything that glows the darkness with color and magic.

Only nights, though. In the days the comet was awful to behold: a red-rimmed eye that unceasingly gazed upon you. Your mother scolded your fears, saying of course it was no eye, there was no hidden face behind it, either, no invisible form staring down at you from the sky beyond, down at the entire planet, considering what awful things to do. Your teacher, too, had to calm your nerves: at recess you preferred to stay in the classroom, out of sight, and she would goad you outdoors with the other children. They didn’t care a whit about the burning eye in the sky. Lunatics. It was as if they couldn’t see it, couldn’t sense that the life they were leading all around them was mere illusion, the eye the real thing, the truth beyond all.

Only one other ever shared your fear. A boy who began weeks after the start of term. He was assigned to the desk beside your own, dark complexioned boy, slight and sensitive to light, frail blood. Rumors circulated that he was an orphan from the orphanage, dropped off each day by a white van driven by a frown with a mustache, always quick to turn back into the road. You considered this type of life: to go home to a place where no one would hug you, feed you, love you. At home some nights you felt guilty. Your appetite diminished. Your mother asked what ailed you, but you kept it all in.

He found you one day at recess, during those comet-days, hiding in the boy’s bathroom.

“Listen,” he said. “I see what you see. I know. But understand: that eye is a weak eye. You have nothing to fear from it.”

He took out a small kitchen knife.

“Come,” he said. “Now we will take our blood-oath. We will be brothers-against-the-eye.”

You felt so alarmed at his words that the knife slicking your palm barely hurt.

Not much later the comet stopped staring at you.

Not much later the mustached man came into the class and pointed at your blood-brother, took him away for good.

Those sad comet days. The comet gonebut the fearful feeling lingered. Still does. Sensitive child. Even weather gave you as much unrest as people. Storms kept you up at night, flinching. Fear of lightning, fear of thunder, of talking to strangers, revealing yourself. Anything that could be used in the predictive arts disturbed you. Clouds. Distant smoke hanging fat on the sky. Chicken bones. You and your strange proclivities. You’ve gotten over it, sort of, over the years, that uneasy fear of magic and society both.

It’s not real. It’s just pretend.

It will be over soon.

The way we soothe ourselves, our eyes squeezed shut against the monsters in the dark.

“Hey, Mister, look out there, would you?”

Sitting on a rocking chair on a boardwalk raised above the mucking streets, laid alongside an office building, the girl. As she stares at you, she has a strangeness to her, a gathering behind her eyes that belies more years than her form suggests. Twelve or thirteen or so. She is dressed inappropriately: a tiny fold of shiny belly skin gleams between her yellow t-shirt and white gym shorts. She sits on the chair’s edge so that it tilts forward, as if readying for launch. The chair faces you, putting you in the position of target.

She blows a pink bubble until it bursts, and smiles.

“Looking for my friends, weren’t you. That’s dull.”

You aren’t sure how you’ll explain yourself–how do any of us know why we do what we do when we do it? She doesn’t seem to care much either way and eases back into the chair, shuts her eyes, and begins telling you a story. Practiced, or at least prepared, as if she’s been waiting to tell you her tale.

All the rest in this town (she explains) know and don’t care about my terrible existence. It is all, she says, rocking slowly, totally lame. It began with the arrival in my household of a foreign man who married my poor foolish mother—and that SOB almost immediately began gazing longingly on me. Dirty bird. Each morning, day, and evening, his eyes were like a comet, staring at me with gross old man passion. Had nothing to do with me, just this body that holds me. That’s the life I get to lead, I guess.

She tells you how things soon worsened: the death of her mother, hit by a car while picking up a penny: the foreigner becoming her guardian, sharing—and finally realizing—his lascivious hopes for her. You can’t bear to listen, yet you do, and a sooty grime creeps upon you with each word she speaks. Somehow it’s worse that she tells her tale idly, barely interested. How she was caravanned across the country. Kidnapped by the first man, then a second man who came along, the two rivals trying to possess her again and again.

“I’m over it. It’s happened since I was a girl. It’s happening now.” She yawns and reaches down to scratch her bare girlish legs. “I think they like driving all around and staying at hotels, you know? Who likes bugs. Touring the country like a coupla old farts, ugh.” She looks at you with her long-lidded eyes, and you almost turn away, distrusting yourself. “I’m just an idea,” she sighs. “That’s it, that’s me, just some tart nothing that lets them get away with being dullards.”

This poor girl. Those terrible men. This awful, awful world.

A violent anger begins to itch inside you.

This girl must be avenged.

You move toward her and she leans away, fear in her eyes. Where are they now? you demand. The two men?

Her voice is weak as she lifts a quavering finger to the road: “One went that way. The other, the other way. Here,” she says, pressing a crumpled note into your hand. “This is where to find them.

“And know this,” she says, her blue eyes damp with tears: “they are brothers.”

Follow the first or the second?